What's the bar exam like anyway?

This is an iHeart podcast.

Guaranteed human.

Living with an autoimmune condition isn't easy, and every journey is different.

That's why season five of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition from Ruby Studio and Argenix shares powerful first-hand stories from people with conditions like MG and CIDP.

Hosted by Martine Hackett, these conversations dive into what resilience really looks like through setbacks, breakthroughs, and finding strength in community.

Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Banking with Capital One helps you keep more money in your wallet with no fees or minimums on checking accounts and no overdraft fees. Just ask the Capital One Bank Guy.

It's pretty much all he talks about, in a good way. He'd also tell you that this podcast is his favorite podcast, too.
Thanks, Capital One Bank Guy. What's in your wallet? Terms apply.

See Capital One.com/slash bank. Capital One NA, member FDIC.
Experience the beloved Harry Potter stories like you've never heard them before on Audible.

Harry Potter, the full cast audio editions, presents the iconic series as a truly spellbinding listening event for the whole family, with a spectacular A-list cast, including Hugh Laurie as Albus Dumbledore, Matthew McFaddyan as Voldemort, and many more.

The first story in the series, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, is available now with new audiobooks in the series releasing every month thereafter.

It's Harry Potter like you've never heard it before. Listen on Audible.
Go to audible.com/slash hp1 and start listening today.

Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too.
And this is one of those good old-fashioned rootin' tootin',

rooty-fruity

episodes of Stuff You Should Know.

Rudy, Tootie, Fresh, and Fruity. That's right.
I forgot the rest of it, but yes, you knew what I was laying down. Can I shock you right off the bat? Yes.
I don't think I have ever been

in an IHOP restaurant in Eden.

I don't think so. See, this is normally where I'd be like, what? Yeah.
But I don't think you're missing enough to warrant a what?

Yeah. I mean, if it was always Waffle House, if we were going to do something like that.

So, yeah. Never been in an IHOP.
The two are actually not really that comparable, to tell you the truth. I mean,

if you went to a Waffle House and then went to an IHOP, you wouldn't be like been to one, been to the other.

Their menus are different enough. The vibe's different enough.
Is IHOP more relatable to like a Denny's? Yes. Okay.
I've been to Denny's, but not much. Then you don't need to go to IHOP.

Can we thank the listener who suggested this episode? Yeah, I remember their email, but I don't remember their name. Yeah, because I finally actually wrote it down and we're not doing it weeks later.

But this came from listener Rowan.

And I'm not sure how to pronounce this last name, but I'm going to go with Garindasi.

That's a great name. Garendaisi?

I like Garendaisy more because of the Daisy part. Yeah, but Rowan wrote in and I was like, you know what? I think someone in Rowan's life had taken the bar.

And I think they realized that they didn't know much about it. And I was like, you know, I've never really thought much about the bar exam and I don't know anything about it.

Well, didn't they also send like a little clip or an anecdote about how crazy it gets during the test? Like how nuts people will, or what nuts or lengths they'll go to to finish.

Yeah, yeah, I think I do remember that actually. Well, save it.

Save it. Let's talk about the bar exam, Chuck.
For those people who aren't aware, and from what I can understand, essentially every country in the world that has lawyers has a bar exam,

but it's the test

that you have to take in most places to become a practicing attorney, to become licensed as an attorney. And that's it.
There's bar exam, everybody. Goodbye.

Yeah,

exactly. And, you know, they

the word bar is there because I think it's named after the literal bar railing in a courtroom that divides the public from, you know, the business end.

Right. Where they, yeah, where you're not really supposed to go past or else a bailiff will jump on you.
Yeah, exactly.

I remember there was a local news story once about a judge who'd been drinking like during work. Uh-huh.

And like they followed him like on his lunch hour and followed him into like a place where he was drinking.

They were like teeing up the story and they said, this judge not only passed the bar, he went in and drank at it. And that, I mean, like, I saw that.
15 years ago, and it's stuck with me ever since.

That's so lazy. It is, but I mean, mean, I thought it was pretty good to tell you the truth.

Yeah, well, that's like when in the old days when we were writers for HowstuffWorks.com and like a shining week is when I wrote a clever,

what do you call the thing under the picture? Caption. Caption.

Now I can't even remember caption with the word caption. That's all right.

Do you remember any good ones? No, no, but I was like, hey, Emily, check this out. I wrote a clever caption.
It was my first professional writing job. So I was, you know, showing pride.

No, I remember that. We used to tell one another our great clever captions.
Yeah, look at this one. Music lyrics we'd fit into

articles that we just thought we were so sly about. Yeah.
And now we just say dumb things with our mouths. Right.

Well, I feel like we've shaken off all of the curious lawyers who don't normally listen to us, so we can get started, everybody.

One of the things about the bar exam that I never understood, and I would guess also that most people out there who aren't attorneys or aspiring attorneys wouldn't really get.

But there's a lot of criticism about the bar exam.

It's just not, it's not just some test that lawyers have to take to get licensed, which on its face sounds great because, like with any professional licensing, that protects the public from incompetent lawyers.

They have to show that they understand the minimum standard of how to practice law.

that will prevent them from being such a dipstick that their clients are going to get electrocuted because they represented them so poorly. It's way, way more intricate than that.

Socially speaking, culturally speaking, socioculturally speaking.

Yeah.

Because you don't want to end up with a Lionel Hutz, right?

No, he almost certainly did not pass the bar.

Well,

we'll get to it, but you don't necessarily have to pass the bar in every state in the United States to practice law. But sit on it, everybody, because that's coming.

I guess we should go back in time and talk about a little bit of the history, because if you go back to colonial days, pre-states in the United States, or not in the United States, but, you know, what will one day be the United States.

To buy the rest of the curious lawyers. Exactly.

There were no bar exams because there were no law schools. If you wanted to work as a lawyer,

you would apprentice or clerk for a practicing lawyer for, you know, sometimes you would just do it

and donate your time to working for them. Sometimes you would do that and actually pay them,

which, you know, it seems like a pretty good system. And we'll talk more about apprenticing later because for my money, I think that's a pretty good way to do things.
Yeah.

But by 1750, which is pretty early on, all of the colonies

got on board basically and said, all right,

we need standards for people to do this job. And we need to kind of all agree on what that's going to be.

Yeah, and like a lot of stuff or most things with American law, they were following in the tradition of England, which had had some sort of exam or another for people to become attorneys as far back as the 16th century.

But

America wasn't that far behind, you know, a couple hundred years. Apparently, the first one was Delaware in 1783.

And it was essentially just you would go and hang out with a judge and they would quiz you on some legal stuff. Yeah.

And if you got it right, you were you were accepted to the bar. You were an attorney from that point on.
It was okay for you to practice. It was also supposedly looked on as very easy too.

Yeah,

I imagine a lot of that depended on the judge that you got and like maybe how much they liked you in those early days. It was really sort of the wild, wild west.
Right.

Libby helped us with this and she dug up a pretty fun story about Abraham Lincoln, who was a bar examiner for the state of Illinois in the 1850s and was apparently just like at a hotel chatting with a lawyer in a room.

And the lawyer answered a few questions and Lincoln was like, congratulations, you're an attorney.

So great, man. Yeah.

Yeah, I love that story, too. I mean, I can just see Lincoln busting it out so casually.
Yeah, I think the takeaway is the guy didn't even know the test had begun, essentially. No, he had no idea.

Exactly. I'm glad you added that part.
Sure.

So the actual first written bar exam, kind of like they are today, that popped up around 1855, I think, in Massachusetts.

And then it became a requirement about 20 years later in Suffolk County, where Boston was. And by 1920, written exams were like the way to go.

And because now it wasn't just getting quizzed with the judge,

law schools started popping up and developing to kind of train you to prepare for that written exam at the very least.

And they actually became an alternative to apprenticing, which, as you'll see later on, is kind of inverted these days. But that was something you could do.

If, like, say, all of the lawyers in your town were jerks,

you could go to a law school instead of apprenticing. When you graduated law school, then you could take your bar exam.
Those were your two ways, your two paths to the bar exam back then. Yeah.

By 1921, the American Bar Association was around and they said, you know, we really prefer a written exam to license. I don't think they mandated it at that point.
Yeah.

But they, you know, the states generally kind of fell in line behind the ABA.

And I think by 1931, another decade later, the American Association of Law Schools got together with a committee and they said, all right, we need to develop a real system here.

So they came together with the National Conference of Bar Examiners.

And at that time, 1930s, they were really like the testing that they were concerned about was what they call black letter law, just sort of really unambiguous black and white, yes or no answers to things on, like, you know, how things are literally legally defined and not a lot of like,

you know, hypotheticals being bandied about, which you're going to get.

Yeah, exactly, which you're going to get more these days in the bar exam.

Yeah. But one of the problems with taking a test like that is that your hand can get cramped.
They didn't want prospective lawyers' hands cramping.

So in 1972, the National Conference of Bar Examiners came up with the multi-state bar examination.

And that created a multiple choice test.

It also really kind of dug into like your knowledge. But at the same time, you can also say like, this is where it became a little more standardized and less loosey-goosey.

But in that sense, it also became a little more

scientific minded

by creating a test that you could say, this is right, this is wrong. And it wasn't just legal terms.
They were applying it to hypothetical, hypothetical situations, but it was still multiple choice.

So you could grade it much more easily. Yeah.
I don't know how I feel about multiple choice in a test like this.

Anytime you can sort of guess. Right.

I don't think you can necessarily guess your way to success, but I don't know.

I think you just came up with a t-shirt. Guess your way to success.
Yeah, totally. And then on the back, just a ABCD and just a check mark next to the C.
All of the above. All of the above.

Go ahead. You go ahead.

Oh, well, as this is sort of developing over the decades, I think we're at the seventies here, but it kind of became clear during this period that, like, hey, what what we've got here is a gatekeeping service, essentially.

Ostensibly, the reason was, like you said, is like we want to keep only like you know, really knowledgeable people that know what they're doing in these jobs to protect people that hire them for lots and lots of money.

But as this was happening, it became even more clear that there was a side effect of that, which was,

you know, immigrants, black people, other people of color that were vying to become attorneys were having a harder time. And this is evidence really early on in 1912.

They accidentally admitted three black attorneys

into the ABA because they didn't have, you know, like check here for race. And then they were like, oh, goodness, we accidentally let in three black attorneys.

So we need to start screening basically for race. Yeah, they said we need to add a check here for race thing on the application to take the bar exam.
And that's essentially what they did.

So from 1912 all the way to 1943,

if you checked African-American or God knows what they had down for you to check back then,

you were just not allowed to take the bar exam. Sorry.

Like this is, it was an actual, like you said, a gatekeeping mechanism to prevent black people from becoming lawyers in the United States. And so in 1925,

prospective black lawyers said nuts to that. And they got together with actual black lawyers and they came up with the National Bar Association, which is still around today.

as an alternative for black attorneys to basically become attorneys rather than have to go through the ABA.

Yeah. And, you know, since then, especially in like the 1970s,

there seemed to be like a series of lawsuits from black lawyers in different states that were suing over various what they felt were you know discriminatory policies within the test.

I don't think many of those were successful though, were they?

No.

The one that sticks out the most that I've heard the most described as,

well, just basically a good example of the lawsuits that came around at this this time was Tyler versus Vickery, or Tyler v. Vicker, if you're a lawyer.

It was a class action suit that alleged that Georgia's bar examinations cut score, which is the minimum score you have to have to pass, had been adjusted with the introduction of the multi-state bar exam.

Remember the multiple choice test that they introduced?

That it had basically been introduced and designed to continue to keep black people from passing the bar exam.

And the Fifth Circuit Court of Georgia said,

we don't really think that's true.

For some reason, they said we don't see any intent to discriminate, which is neither here nor there under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which prevents employment discrimination.

But they also said, here's the thing, the bar, the American Bar Association is not an employer. They're not a labor organization.
They're not an employment agency.

So therefore, Title VII doesn't really apply to them.

And the court said, aba continue to discriminate through the bar exam as you see fit yeah that i i'm not i don't know much about lawyer stuff uh in my

spit about lawyer

in my no spit in my civilian mind uh i see that as kind of a punt um legally speaking and maybe that was that maybe that's you know a lot of times you decide something on on precedent and whether or not you feel it's right or not that's just the precedent but um i don't know that felt like a punt to me by saying, like, well, they're not an employer or an agency or labor organization.

So we're just sort of not going to hear this one. Yeah.
And this reveals to me something that I just find fascinating is when lawyers sue

other lawyers or bodies of lawyers or judges rule on the test that it takes to create lawyers and therefore judges,

it just seems so fraught.

with basically opinion because they're so like it's not like the judge is learning about this for the first time they're coming at it from fresh eyes like this is like part of their fabric is having been a law student and becoming a lawyer and then becoming a judge, you know?

I just find it fascinating. Yeah, totally.

Should we wrap up sort of the testing stuff and then take a break?

Yeah, let's get back into the evolution of the test again. Yeah, so now we're in the late 80s, 1988.
I'm a junior in high school, still seeking that first kiss.

And the NCBE has added the multi-state essay examination at this point. So now you're back to essaying, which is how it previously had been until that multiple choice test.

And in 97, it handed over the multi-state performance test or the MPT,

which says, hey, let's

sort of

do some practice stuff, like write up a brief for me or write out a memo or draft a memo. Let's see how you do on that.

And then finally, in 2011, the uniform bar exam or the UBE was adopted by most states

where all three of those tests kind of make that one up as one big test.

Yeah, which is, you know, if you're a state and you don't feel like going to the trouble of coming up with your entire, your own bar exam,

now you can just use the UBE. Yeah.
And it's proven.

Like it's, it's, there's all sorts of great questions in there. You sacrificed state law.
But a lot of people say like, well, like law students don't need to sit around and memorize state law.

That's a a waste of time

in favor of the UBE, which is pretty rich because a lot of people argue that the UBE itself is a waste of time because you have to memorize general law rather than state law, which we'll talk more about that.

I just am chomping at the bit right now. Yeah, but it did make it more easy to transfer from state to state and stuff like that.

And we'll get into those specifics too. But let's take that break.
Okay. And we'll get into the basics of the bar right after this.

Support for this show comes from Public, the investing platform for those who take it seriously.

On Public, you can build a multi-asset portfolio of stocks, bonds, options, crypto, and now generated assets, which allow you to turn any idea into an investable index with AI.

It all starts with your prompt, from renewable energy companies with high free cash flow to semiconductor suppliers growing revenue over 20% year over year.

You can literally type any prompt and put the AI to work. It screens thousands of stocks, buys one-of-a-kind index, and lets you backtest it against the SP 500.
Then you can invest in a few clicks.

Generated assets are like ETFs with infinite possibilities, completely customizable and based on your thesis, not someone else's.

Go to public.com/slash SYSK and earn an uncapped 1% bonus when you transfer your portfolio. That's public.com/slash SYSK.
Paid for by Public Investing.

Brokerage Services by Open to the Public Investing Inc., member FINRA and SIPC. Advisory Services by Public Advisors LLC, SEC Registered Advisor.
Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool.

Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. Complete disclosures available at public.com/slash disclosures.
The busiest time of the year? it's here.

Between parties, shopping, and decorating. Who has time? With Airtasker, you can get anything done: cleaning, wrapping, even someone to build a gingerbread house that doesn't collapse.

Download the Airtasker app or go to Airtasker.com. Airtasker, get anything done.

10 athletes will face the toughest job interview in fitness that will push past physical and mental breaking points.

You are the fittest of the fit. Only one of you will leave here with with an IFIT contract for $250,000.
This is where the mindset comes in. Someone will be eliminated.
Pressure is coming down.

This is Trainer Game. Watch it on Prime Video starting January 8th.

So, Chuck, it turns out there's 56 jurisdictions in the United States.

I didn't.

50 states plus some territories. You got some overseas possessions.
You got,

you know. What else?

So there's 56, and each jurisdiction has its own highest agency that basically says these are the standards to become a lawyer in the state.

And again, a lot of them just said you have to pass the uniform bar exam. That's the standard.

But they also can kind of mess with it here or there. And it's up to

this agency that's associated with the highest court in the state, usually the state Supreme Court. Yeah, exactly.

In most jurisdictions, if you, just to take the bar exam, you have to have graduated from an accredited law school from the American Bar Association,

which usually means a three-year program.

Some states, though, are like, hey, if you're not, if you didn't go to an accredited school, that's fine. We'll still let you take the bar.

If you are in Washington state, Virginia, Vermont, or California, they allow a legal apprenticeship to swap out

law school, which I think is super kind of cool. Yeah.
And Maine and New York let you sub out like a year or two of that law school for an apprenticeship. Yeah, for sure, which is pretty neat.

It's old school. It's a throwback kind of thing.
Yeah. If you want to take the bar exam, most of the time it's given in February and July.
Those are your two options.

And then you're going to pay some money for it. And there's a lot of ways you're you're going to pay money for it just to register to take it.
The bar exam itself, it can be a few hundred dollars.

It can be more than a thousand dollars, depending on your state and how greedy they are. Yeah.

If you want to use a laptop, you want to type out your briefs and your memos and your essays rather than write them out because you get hand cramps like the old lawyers used to. Yeah.

You're going to have to pay a fee for that. And the reason why is because there is no chance you're going to be allowed to bring your own laptop because they keep the

place so tight and are so hawkish about preventing cheating that they actually provide tampons to people who need them because you're not allowed to bring in your own tampon. Wow.
Really?

Yeah, that's happened. And apparently it's not just an isolated thing that they have a bowl of tampons.
Wow. And you grab one if you need it and you hope that they don't run out if you really need it.

So yeah, it's it's um it's like there's no way you're bringing your own laptop in. Yeah, or tampon.
Exactly. So, wow, I never knew that.
That's a nice little tidbit. Thanks.

I thought that was pretty great too.

So

you have to have money to register, like you said. You have to have money

to, you know, a lot of times people take off work for several months.

So you have to have a life that can do that, you know, which indicates a certain amount of at least either privilege or maybe hard work and saving, if that's how you did it, which is great.

And then almost assuredly, you have paid several thousand dollars, maybe as much as $6,000 to take preparatory courses.

About 60% of the market share in the United States is a company called B-A-R-B-R-I Barbary.

It can be up to $6,000, maybe as low as $1,800.

And they have been around since the 1950s.

And I was i was like what does barbary stand for and i had a a weirdly hard time finding out uh what it stood for until i sadly wikipedia just turned it up i should have gone to the most obvious place but uh i think when they merged in 2021 uh or no no no they merged in the 70s i think uh and it was just the the names of uh two companies i think bay area review was bar and the bar review inc was bri and so they just squashed those together so kind of a boring story

I had seen that it was a merger of Barbizon Modeling School and Bree,

meaning the makers of Brie cheese around the world. Wow.
That's a mashup I could enjoy. Right.

And the $6,000 one that you can pay for, like the premium test prep, they actually have somebody take the test for you. And they even provide the person with a wig that matches your hair.

So it looks a lot like you, too.

I did see, though, they have a guarantee if you do not, if you pay that money to them and you don't pass the bar,

I think you get to take the course again for free one more time if you're taking the exam again.

Okay, that's not. So you don't get your money back, but you get to retake the course at no charge.
No. Barbizon modeling has long had a motto, you don't get your money back.
Right. Yeah, exactly.

So let's break down the UBE, the uniform bar examination, which is the culmination of decades of the National Conference of Bar Examiners' hard work, sweat, blood, tears, joy, pain. Yeah.

And again, it's, you can break it down into three parts that kind of came along separately. The first, remember, was that multiple choice test, the multi-state bar examination.
Yeah.

There's 200 multiple choice questions. I've seen 175.
I guess it depends on,

I don't know, your jurisdiction and how much, how valuable they find, 25 questions. Yeah, maybe.
But it covers seven different areas of the law. You want to take them?

Sure. Simple procedure, contracts, of course.
Nice. Torts.

Constitutional law.

Criminal law, the sexiest law. Careful.

Criminal law and procedure, that is. Evidence, which is its own category, and real property.
Kaching.

And that is 50%

of the UBE score. Then

the other two are the multi-state essay, once again, which is 30%.

And then the two multi-state performance tests, tasks, and that is 20%.

Yep.

So you're like, okay, I could take that. No problem.

Sure, you might be able to take it. You probably wouldn't pass.
And you'd give up 12 hours plus of your life, 12 hours just of the test.

It's spread out over three days technically, but the UBE takes up two of those days.

12 hours divided by two days divided by four sessions. So three in the morning, three in the afternoon.
Go to your hotel room, can't sleep, toss and turn.

Come back the next morning, three in the morning, three in the afternoon. Yeah.

Oh, well, we should mention too, that's another reason you might be paying some extra money if you don't live near a testing site, like travel and room and board and all that stuff. Good point.

And scotch at the end of the day, of course. That's right.

It's graded on a 400-point scale.

Depends on the state on what they consider passing.

Generally, 260 to 270.

I said state, of course, jurisdiction.

And then apparently it's like

it's not like acing the bar gets you anything more than passing the bar.

You pass it and that's great. But I have some inside info from attorney friends, which I'll kind of dabble in here and there.

But I think it's sort of untoward to, you don't go in and be like, oh, ace the bar. Yeah, I saw a Reddit post where somebody posted like, I got a score of 330.
And I mean, is that high?

I don't mean to make anybody who's got lower than that feel bad, but I'm just curious. Like, what do you guys think? And it was like, you disgust us.

Like, that is just sad. So, yeah, it's not really cool to flex on people over your bar score.
And you pass. That's all that matters.
That's right. And then if you do pass, there's always a

gaggle of attorneys, usually quite experienced, seasoned attorneys, who just are waiting for you to finish. And when you finish, they embrace you.

And that's how you know that you've passed the bar exam.

We did mention that those UBE scores are portable.

It's not like the old days when you had to pass that state's bar.

I think that's how it used to be kind of across the board.

They're transferable for two to five years after taking the exam. It depends on the jurisdiction, of course.

And then

if you're in a jurisdiction that doesn't utilize that UBE test, most of them still have the MBE as a big part of their exam, usually with their own specific state law stuff if they do that.

And there's usually also a third day, which you were talking about earlier, that third test,

which is like a 60-question ethics test. Right.

It's called the Multi-State Professional Responsibility Examination, the MPRE. Yes.
And they ask you questions.

It's scored separately, but they have questions like, you know, Attorney Lionel Hutz brought in a bag of pot to

one of his clients into prison. Is attorney Hutz guilty of loving too much? Right.

Was that a real Simpsons thing? No. Oh, okay, because I could see that.

They only really talked about pot like on a couple of really great episodes, but you know. No, that wasn't their bag normally.
That wasn't their bag of pot.

No, yeah. That wasn't their sack.

Don't use that word. Yeah, sack's kind of gross, isn't it? Moist.
Oh, boy.

What was the other one? Moist sack.

Or pussy?

Go look that up in the transcript. Don't.
Don't do it.

Let's talk about pass rates because it really obviously depends on the state. They can vary pretty wildly, actually, from looking at some of these stats.
I think for first-timers...

From July of this year's testing, 2025, first-timer pass rates, there was a range like from 66% in Connecticut to almost 90% in Utah. So go Utah.

If you look at overall rates, not necessarily just first-timers, 2025, only 54% in the state of Alabama, once again, compared to 86 in Utah.

So I don't know what's in the water out there in Utah, but those attorneys are sipping it up. Oh, it's widely considered a really easy state to pass the bar.
Oh, is it really? Yeah. Oh, interesting.

Okay. Some very hard places to take the bar around the world, actually, that I saw.
Nigeria, Singapore, Korea, Japan, Ontario, Canada, Canada,

New York State.

New York State's bar exam is so difficult. It's like as hard as the entire nations of Singapore's.

So there are, it definitely varies by jurisdiction and by country just how hard it can be. Wow.
That's interesting.

I do know that of the 2022 graduates, this is just another sort of stat for you, over 90% of graduates from accredited schools passed within a couple of years. But

from what I see, there's really no shame for it to take a crack or two to pass the bar.

I don't think, I don't know if it's something you're going to like run around the office telling people on your first day, but I don't think it's like a mark of shame.

There have been plenty of very successful attorneys, very famous attorneys that didn't pass the bar on the first go, including Michelle Obama

and Hillary Clinton. And

I think JFK, yeah, a bunch of DIMs.

JFK Jr. I think took two or three times to pass.
I saw that. And old Kim Kardashian took a time or two.

Yeah, I think three.

Three? And there's actually limits on how many times you can take it, depending on your state, your jurisdiction, your territory. Oh, well, they just say, sorry,

it sounds like you should try another line of work. There are some places that say that.
I don't know if they actually say that.

The gaggle of attorneys tells you that that when you fail the sixth time.

But there are other places that have discretionary rules where after you reach a certain number, like say I think six is the highest I've seen,

you can apply to take it again. You can basically go to the state bar and be like, please,

I want to be a lawyer so bad. I'm just really terrible at this.

Yeah. I mean, it is a test and some people aren't great test takers.
We'll kind of talk about that in a little bit. But also,

I imagine there's plenty of things you can do with the law degree if you haven't passed the bar, right?

Yeah, I mean, it's great. Like, you see somebody referred to, like, oh, this is a lawyer or something, but they have it's like they're in some field that has nothing to do with law.
Yeah.

You're just like, they very frequently are advisors,

like, just

they know how far you can bend the law. Okay.
There's a lot of stuff you can do with it. All right.
Yeah. You can always teach, I imagine.
Oh, yeah, that's you.

Um, I have a little cute little addition addendum to this part.

Let's go.

The youngest person ever to pass the bar is Sophia Park.

She passed the bar in 2024 at age

17 years, eight months. And was that after law school even? Yeah, she started law school at 13.
Oh, she's one of those. So she beat the previous record by three months.

The previous record had been set at age, I guess, 18 years and and one month by her brother, Peter. Man.
Isn't that nuts? It's a smart family. It is.
They really wanted to be lawyers. Yeah.

Or, you know, are they practicing law or are they just like, I just wanted to show off? Oh, I believe they're both practicing law. Yeah, I guess so.

Well, should we take another break, Chuck? I guess we should. Well, one more little tidbit here at the end.

You know, we said that

a bar exam is basically to say, hey, you can practice law.

The one other thing that it does is it helps determine what schools can teach it because the ABA requires that law schools, if you want to be in an accredited law school, a certain percentage of your graduates have to pass the bar within two years.

Otherwise, your accreditation goes away. Yeah, I saw 75% of your graduates have to pass.
All right. Or they're like, sorry, I guess you're not teaching well enough.
Exactly.

I wanted my tidbit to be last, so I'm just going to repeat it now, okay?

On second thought, we'll just go to break. How about that? All right, we'll be right back.

Support for this show comes from Public, the investing platform for those who take it seriously.

On Public, you can build a multi-asset portfolio of stocks, bonds, options crypto, and now generated assets, which allow you to turn any idea into an investable index with AI.

It all starts with your prompt, from renewable energy companies with high free cash flow to semiconductor suppliers growing revenue over 20% year over year.

You can literally type any prompt and put the AI to work. It screens thousands of stocks, buys one-of-a-kind index, and lets you backtest it against the S ⁇ P 500.

Then, you can invest in a few clicks. Generated assets are like ETFs with infinite possibilities, completely customizable and based on your thesis, not someone else's.

Go to public.com slash SYSK and earn an uncapped 1% bonus when you transfer your portfolio. That's public.com slash SYSK.
Paid for by Public Investing.

Brokerage Services by Open to the Public Investing Inc., member FINRA and SIPC. Advisory Services by Public Advisors LLC, SEC Registered Advisor.
Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool.

Output Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. Complete disclosures available at public.com/slash disclosures.

Meet Lisa, a mom who starts the holidays full of cheer until the to-do list takes over. Untangling lights, prepping for the class party, wrapping gifts.
She was running out of time and energy.

Then Lisa discovered Air Tasker. She posted her tasks, set her budget, and local taskers helped with everything.
Lights, strung, cupcakes, baked, gifts, wrapped.

Even a cardboard sleigh for the school play. Suddenly, her holiday holiday spirit was back.
Now she spends less time scrambling and more time making memories.

Download the Airtasker app or go to airtasker.com. Airtasker, get anything done.

10 athletes will face the toughest job interview in fitness that will push past physical and mental breaking points.

You are the fittest of the fit. Only one of you will leave here with an IFIT contract for $250,000.
This is where mindset comes in. Someone will be eliminated.
Pressure is coming down.

This is Trainer Game. Watch it on Prime Video starting January 8th.

All right, so we're back with more critiques and problems on the bar because if you start to do a little digging, it turns out there's been

a lot of of that over the years for a lot of different reasons. You know, we've mentioned some of the stuff while it was developing, basically,

you know, banning people of color from even taking the test for a long time.

But black and Hispanic Americans are still very underrepresented in the field of law. And, you know, that's a problem because when you're a practicing attorney, like a lot of

opinion, that's why they call them opinions and judgment goes into it. And sure, it's based on precedent, but your perspective is important.
And having diverse perspectives is also important.

Right. Yeah, for sure.
It's

a white male profession, essentially, statistically speaking, that is far and away the largest population represented in the legal profession in the United States.

And there's statistics and figures that kind of show the disparity here.

There's some data from 2021 from the American Bar Association that showed that white law school graduates passed on their first try at the bar exam at a rate 24% higher than black students, 13% higher than Hispanic students, and 15% higher than Native Americans.

So those are really substantial disparities in passing the bar the first time.

And so

being in the hot seat, the National Conference of Bar Examiners is like, hey, hey, hey, everybody, mellow out here.

This tracks with other scoring of racial disparities, like law school grades, LSAT grades. This is in line with them.
Just leave the bar exam alone.

And by the way, their interpretation is that this is an example of longstanding systemic racial disparities. in the American education system that start way back long before

somebody gets to law school and goes to take the bar. And that the bar exam is just showing this.
It's just reflecting this problem elsewhere.

So again, stop looking at the bar is essentially what the NCBE says. It also kind of sounds like we're just a part of the grand history of

systemic discrimination throughout our country. Well, that's a critique of them, too.
People are like, that's your answer? Like, we're just perpetuating an already existing racial disparity.

Like, that's essentially what they're saying in that argument. Yeah, it's definitely a strange argument.

Other people say that

you know just part of that disparity is you know the cost associated with law school and to be a successful candidate.

And like we said, the privilege that it takes to maybe be able to pay for that and then take off months' work and pay for the very best.

preparatory courses. You know, that's it's just sort of all in the big soup of privilege, you know.
Right.

I saw that black and Hispanic students who take the bar exam are 50% likelier to work during their bar prep period

than a white student. Like it's just

logistically speaking, racially speaking, it's just much likelier that a white test taker is going to be able to not work and just dedicate their time to prepping for the bar.

And I mean, that alone explains a lot of it because the bar exam is essentially

like it's a standardized test where you memorize essentially year one law school stuff. Yeah, I mean, that's one of the other critiques is that,

you know, it's a memorization test, and

it there have been plenty of studies that show that it doesn't necessarily isn't a marker toward your future performance as an attorney or you're like your, how successful you may be. Right.

There was a study in 2024 from Nevada

that compared scores scores on the

MBE and other components of their test of, I think, a little more than 500 new attorneys and how they were basically rated, how affected they were by their peers and their supervisors and judges.

And they did find a small positive relationship between some of the ratings, some parts of the bar. But at the end of the day, overall, they said it was minimally predictive of career success.

and negligibly related. The Nevada performance test was negligibly related to success.
Yeah, those low correlations were as low as 1 to 4%.

I think 4% was the highest. As far as the actual whole bar exam

relating to these ratings of how effective these lawyers were by their peers, they said we can only account for that with 12% of the bar exam.

The other, the rest of the distinctions or the differences in effectiveness has nothing to do with their score on the bar exam. And so people say, like, well, what the heck is the bar exam doing?

And again, the National Conference of Bar Examiners are like, we're testing for lawyer competence to protect the public, dummy. And people say, well, how are you testing for legal competence? Yeah.

Like,

what is legal competence? And this is where the National Conference of Board Examiners pull their shirt away from their necks.

You can see some sweat breaking out on their forehead because they've never given a definition of competence.

And if you don't have a definition of competence, how can you, in a standardized way, test people for whether they meet that definition or not?

So people say like the bar exam under that, that description is by definition invalid.

It's not a valid test, meaning that it doesn't test the thing it purports to test because we just have no idea what it is testing. You know what you just sounded like? What? An attorney.

Sounds like you just dropped the mic in court and then sat down and I was to your, just sat down on your left and I put my hand on your shoulder and was like, hell yeah, man.

Got him.

There have also been a lot of just sort of disasters in recent years, very public ones in terms of the bar.

During COVID, they offered remote exams, and it was just sort of a joke in a lot of cases. There were a lot of computer problems like programs crashing.

They had facial recognition issues issues and that sometimes they failed to identify dark skinned test takers. So that's that's bad right off the bat.

You also, again, you know, it was remote, so you had to keep your eyes on the screen at all times, or they would think you're cheating if you're looking around or looking into your lap or something.

So people were like literally urinating themselves in their seat because they couldn't move.

And one woman went into labor and went through the test and gave birth and then came home and finished the second day. Yeah.

If you want to know how tough Loyola University law students are, there you go.

What about California with the chat GPT questions? This one, it's got a lot of Schadenfreude around it, but California said, nuts to the UBE. We can do a better program ourselves and save money.

So they designed their own bar exam, like just completely eschewed

the uniform bar examination, right?

And it just, the rollout was horrible.

There were people who were taking the test. They would get error messages.
The program would crash during the test. It wouldn't save their essays.

Can you imagine finishing an essay and clicking to save it? And they're like, nope, sorry. Do it again.
That's every student's nightmare. Yeah.
And remember, this is time.

Like you have three hours per segment, right? Like if you don't finish in time, sorry, like you, you have to stop. So that's a huge part of it.

And then also, like you said, Chat GPT, it turned out was involved because some students were like there like are misspellings and typos in some of these multiple choice questions and the california state bar said wait what

yeah uh it turns out that some of those questions were chat be gpt um

uh written by chat gpt they weren't even reviewed by a lawyer um or copy edited by the state agency that oversaw the test because uh

you know i don't know money i guess and this was another case of lawyers suing lawyers and lawyers suing their state state bar and all that.

And it like California has just lost so much money on it. Remember, this is a money-saving thing, too.
So

again, there's like a little bit of shot in Freuda too. Yeah, and there was one incident in New York where someone went into cardiac arrest while taking the test.
That was this year in the July test.

And, you know, people are like, you know, we should help here, right? And the test proctors were like, no, everyone, be quiet. And like,

you know, just keep taking your test and we'll deal with this in the next lunch break.

Yeah, like they had to keep taking their tests while the paramedics were saving this person's life, like next to them, essentially. That was what they were forced to do.
That's how,

I don't know, you choose your own word. They are about assigning these tests or carrying out these tests.

I was working at a TV commercial one time as a PA years ago out in the desert.

in California, and a crew member had a cardiac arrest. And the director told them to move a big fake rock in front of, I mean, they were tending to the guy,

but they were like, we need to keep shooting. Like, go move that big fake rock in front of the paramedic so we can keep shooting.

I guess it's better than the director being like, take that fake rock and finish him off with it. Yeah.
Yeah. And then drag him out of the way.

One thing I wondered, because I always kind of wonder, like, how would we do if we took the SAT now, like, you know, at this stage in life or something?

I wondered about like a really experienced attorney years later if they took the bar again. And Livia dug into that and found a study from 2021.

16 like successful, experienced practicing attorneys from Oklahoma retook the bar essentially with no prep.

It was just like, you know, their prep was their career

on the theory that, hey,

if it's measuring ability, then this should bear out in the grades. And none of them passed.
They got scores ranging from 26 to 52 percent.

So nobody would have passed that bar. And the lawyers who have been practicing longest did the worst out of all of them.

And then one general criticism of the bar exam, too,

in addition to everything else we've just talked about, is that it doesn't in any real way

kind of jibe with what these lawyers are going to do in the legal profession. Right.
It's general questions about law generally in the United States.

Again, it's essentially the stuff you learn in your first year at law school because the next two years, you start to get into your specialization.

And it's a lot of memory and memorization and a lot of lawyering after you graduate and go through the bar and become an attorney is open book research to figure out what law applies. Exactly.

The bar exam is closed book rapid fire testing. So they're like, this is not like it, even putting away everything else, all the other arguments, at its base, it's kind of a flawed test to start with.

Yeah, for sure. And because of that, there are a lot of jurisdictions that have long had workarounds and alternatives, and there are changes on the horizon for the bar itself.

Wisconsin, it's the only state, I guess only jurisdiction, that never stopped saying, hey, you went to law school and you can practice law in this state.

You don't have to take the bar here.

which is pretty cool. I think you have to graduate from one of the state's two law schools there, and they call it diploma privilege.

I think in the past couple of decades, New Hampshire has followed suit a little bit.

And if you graduate with honors from University of New Hampshire Law School and you participate in court simulations and have practical experience, then you can be admitted to practice law without the bar.

Yeah. And we had said earlier that the law school was originally created as an alternative to

apprenticeship. Some states have gone the other way now where the apprenticeships are alternatives to law school.
Like it's a passion. I like that.

I like it too.

Vermont and Virginia, they allow apprenticeships instead of actually instead of the bar exams themselves. Oregon offers apprenticeships where if you're a law school graduate,

you can become a lawyer without the bar exam. If you apprentice for, I think, 675 hours over four weeks in supervised work, you will basically become a lawyer after that.
Four weeks? Four months.

No, four weeks. Four years?

No, I was joking. There's only 675 hours in four weeks.

Oh, okay. So just a week.
But you'd be doing 24 hours a day for a month as an apprentice, which seems score. I'll assume your math checks out.
It does. I even used a calculator.
Oh, great.

I think Washington State has a plan coming in 2026. So more states are kind of getting on board with this.

California last year actually rejected a proposal to become more like Oregon with those apprenticeship hours, even though the state bar of California's Board of Trustees said, we think this is a good idea.

The state Supreme Court said, no, no, no.

But coming around the corner now, we have the next-gen bar exam, right?

Yeah, the NCBE is like everybody settle down. So starting in 2018, they're like, we're going to change this a little bit.
The tests are going to be shorter.

We're going to make it so it's possible to take it remotely if need be.

And then it's just going to be a little different where I think it's a little more essay-heavy than the original test, but they're also carving out some stuff that they're not going to test on like family law and that kind of thing.

So it's a little leaner, meaner kind of bar exam that they're coming up with. All right.

Two things that I saw that are worth mentioning real quick.

If you do away with the bar exam, there's a couple of benefits to that. One is that it puts the onus on law schools themselves to graduate competent lawyers.

Right now, there are some law schools that are considered diploma mills because as long as 75% of your graduates pass the bar within two years, like you stay accredited and you can make a lot of money off that other 25%.

That's one thing that would happen.

Another one is that legal fees would probably come down because one of the functions of gatekeeping that the bar exam does is it artificially keeps the supply of lawyers low, which artificially inflates the fees associated with lawyers, too.

Aha. Pretty good.
Think about that. Yeah.
Yeah. I spoke to my friend.

I think I know a few attorneys here and there, but only like one good friend who's a lawyer

who is electing to remain anonymous in this case. Okay.

But I did text him kind of about all this, and he said, I would say it's only useful in that it shows how you can collect and synthesize a lot of information under time pressure, but that's not really much different than most standardized tests.

But as far as being an indicator of how you'll be as a practitioner, yeah, not so much.

He says, for example, the bar will test you to some extent on the rules of civil procedure, but passing the bar doesn't mean you can walk into a deposition the day after you pass and know how to do that.

As someone who's taken hundreds of depositions, you learn by watching, listening. to more experienced attorneys do it, and then by trial and error, no pun intended, doing it yourself.

He is in favor of the apprenticeships.

He said it's probably a lot more helpful as long as your mentor knew what they were doing.

And then said one thing he would like to see change is like,

I think more

emphasis on writing. He said, I see so many briefs written by someone who allegedly passed the bar that are just horrible.

He said that's probably just a criticism of the legal education more than the bar.

And then he said he wanted to remain anonymous. And he said, I know it sounds silly or overly cautious when there are SCOTIS justices who can accept luxury vacations with impunity,

but I'm supposed to be impartial here. So ragging on the bar might not be a good look.
I think that's smart. Yeah.

You got anything else? I got nothing else. Well, thanks for tapping your anonymous friend.
That was good info. Sure.

If you want to learn more about the bar exam, go take the bar exam.

And in the meantime, it's time for listener mail.

that'd be kind of fun i mean if it was free i would take the bar exam just to like with zero knowledge of anything just to see like how poorly i would do yeah i would too i'd be right next to you peeing in my seat and and going into labor and having a heart attack wouldn't that be funny though if we got like i don't know even like a 20 or something Or if we passed and we just automatically became lawyers.

Yeah, let's do it. All right.

All right. This is about the Salton Sea.
You called for listener mail, right? Mm-hmm. All right.
Hey, guys, I was listening to the Salton Sea episode.

In college, I took an ocean geography class and learned about inland seas. An inland sea, because remember we sort of wondered the difference between seas and lakes.

He said, an inland sea can either be entirely landlocked or have a single river connected to the ocean. Inland seas are larger than lakes and have a salinity between a lake and an ocean.

So I think you mentioned something about salinity.

They're typically remnants of larger oceans and have numerous islands, but of course the scientific community names these things, and sometimes it can be rather confusing.

The Caspian Sea, for example, is classified as a lake, despite being known as the largest inland sea in the world. And the Hudson Bay

is an island sea, or which is, did you know that? An island sea or inland sea?

He says island, but it probably meant inland. Okay.

I didn't know. I had no idea whether it's an island sea or an inland sea.
I had no idea.

Or Dylan's favorite sea is the

Larapintine Sea or the Larapentine Sea. It's an ancient sea that split Australia in half during the Cambrian explosion.

Being a longtime listener and learning about new things is the best part of my commute, guys. That is from Dylan.
Thanks a lot, Dylan. That was great info.

I still like your interpretation, Chuck, which if I remember correctly, you were saying that an inland...

A lake would be landlocked, I think.

Yeah,

I mean, it sounds like there's no true definition i don't know well then let's keep going with yours great nice try dylan uh if you want to be like dylan and send us a great email you can send it off to stuffpodcast at iheartradio.com

stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Living with an autoimmune condition isn't easy, and every journey is different.

That's why season five of Untold Stories, Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition from Ruby Studio and Argenix shares powerful first-hand stories from people with conditions like MG and CIDP.

Hosted by Martine Hackett, these conversations dive into what resilience really looks like through setbacks, breakthroughs, and finding strength in community.

Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Support for the show comes comes from Public, the investing platform for those who take it seriously.

On Public, you can build a multi-asset portfolio of stocks, bonds, options, crypto, and now generated assets, which allow you to turn any idea into an investable index with AI.

It all starts with your prompt.

From renewable energy companies with high-free cash flow to semiconductor suppliers growing revenue over 20% year over year, you can literally type any prompt and put the AI to work.

It screens thousands of stocks, builds a one-of-a-kind index, and lets you backtest it against the SP 500. Then you can invest in a few clicks.

Generated assets are like EFTs with infinite possibilities, completely customizable and based on your thesis, not someone else's.

Go to public.com slash podcast and earn an uncapped 1% bonus when you transfer your portfolio. That's public.com/slash podcast.

Paid for by Public Investing, Brokerage Services by Open to the Public Investing Inc., member FINRA SIPC. Advisory Services by Public Advisors LLC.
SEC Registered Advisor.

Generated Assets is is an interactive analysis tool. Output is for informational purposes only and is not investment recommendation or advice.

Complete disclosures available at public.com/slash disclosures. Meet Lisa, a mom of two who loves the holidays but not the endless to-do list.
So she turned to Airtasker.

Local taskers help decorate, wrap gifts, even build a cardboard sleigh for the school play. Download the Airtasker app or go to airtasker.com, Airtasker, get anything done.
This is an iHeart podcast.

Guaranteed human.